The District of Columbia’s insurance commissioner says he was fired after questioning President Obama’s plan to fix ObamaCare and saying the city might not follow his suggestions.

Commissioner William White told The Washington Post on Saturday that he was called into Mayor Vincent Gray’s office the prior day and told the Democratic mayor “wants to go in a different direction.”

The president said Thursday that the millions of insurance plans scheduled to be canceled next year to comply with ObamaCare regulations could be extended for a year, after he told Americans prior to the law’s passage that they could keep their existing plans.

However, White and other insurance commissioners across the country have questioned the president’s proposed solution because it could create a mess in the marketplace.

Some of the top reasons for the commissioners’ objections are: policy prices are already locked in to comply with changes in ObamaCare; an extension could conflict with state-level laws to comply with the law and younger Americans needed to join the federal exchange to keep down costs will wait to enroll.

White told the newspaper that the deputy mayor who asked him to leave didn’t say the request was about his remarks.

For the past six years President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have waged a relentless attack on the health insurance industry. In the most recent iteration, the president assures us he is not responsible for the wave of health insurance policy cancellations. The insurance companies are.

Okay, so where is the other side..

***

In the early 1980s (while there was still a Berlin Wall), I went through Check Point Charlie from West Berlin to East Berlin. On either side of the wall, there were the same people with the same culture, same genes, etc. The only difference was a difference of political systems, and because of that difference East Berlin was of course poorer.

After about an hour of touring, though, I sensed that there was some other difference and it took me a while to pin point it. In East Berlin, no one smiled. No one laughed. No one joked. People looked at us and at each other with hesitation and even apprehension. Were we really tourists? Or might we be posing as tourists to report on their behavior?

If I could summarize everything in one word, it would be “fear.” The East Germans were afraid. You could see it in their eyes. And that was something you never saw in the West.

So why am I telling you about a 30-year-old experience? Because I sense that same feeling again ? right here, in the United States of America.

Barack Obama could not have been more unequivocal. The telecommunications companies had to be punished for violating the letter of federal law. He didn’t want to hear about how President Bush told them it was okay.

One laughs now remembering how Obama’s base, the anti-anti-terrorist Left and its lawyer legions, used to call Bush the “imperial president” and thunder for his impeachment. Bush couldn’t hold a candle to our incumbent Caligula. He had no idea, for example, that presidents can just “waive” inconvenient parts of congressional statutes, like FISA.

FISA governs foreign intelligence surveillance. It requires the executive branch to get a judicial warrant before it can eavesdrop on alien terrorists and other foreign agents who threaten national security. Nevertheless, after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11, Bush directed the NSA to wiretap suspected jihadists without obtaining court permission. He pressed the telecoms to help the NSA carry out the program — stressing the imperative of protecting American lives during a crisis, assuring these private companies that they would face no legal jeopardy for complying with his request.

Oh no you don’t, Obama and his base shrieked.

After the top-secret program was revealed, a paralyzing debate threatened to shut down American intelligence collection — at a time when we had troops in harm’s way in two war theaters and jihadists continued plotting mass-murder attacks against our homeland. By late 2007, recognizing the desperate need to reopen foreign-intelligence operations, Congress was poised to pass a FISA overhaul that would clarify the NSA’s surveillance authority. But passage was delayed for months because the hard Left refused to budge.

The Left’s goal was to bleed the telecoms dry with lawsuits over Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. Thus they pressured Democrats to block the passage of any FISA bill that would give telecoms the legal protection — in Obama parlance, the “waiver” — Bush had promised them. And the hard Left had a card to play: the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Then-senator Barack Obama, himself a hard Leftist and an opportunist (yes, that’s redundant), realized that captivating the party’s Marxist wing — the anti-business, blame-America-first activists — was vital to capturing the nomination. So he duly dispatched his top campaign spokesman to proclaim to the progressive media, “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

Of course, you must keep in mind that this is Barack Obama we’re talking about — a.k.a. Barack “If You Like Your Health Insurance Plan You Can Keep Your Insurance Plan, $2,500 Premium Reductions, Obamacare Is Not a Tax, The Video Caused Benghazi, Raising the Debt Ceiling Is Unpatriotic, I Didn’t Know About Fast and Furious Until I Read About It in the Newspapers” Obama. So naturally, after he snagged the nomination and it came time to appeal to the sane part of the country in the general election, he did his usual 180 and supported the FISA overhaul with retroactive immunity for the telecoms.

The purpose here is not to prove, yet again, that Obama is a fraud, which would be like proving that Detroit may be a tad mismanaged. The purpose is also not to establish, yet again, Obama’s hypocrisy in condemning Bush’s flouting of a single statute when, once he assumed power, Obama so systematically violated laws that you’d think the oath says, “Take care that the laws be faithlessly executed.” The purpose is not even to reprise Thursday’s remarkable press conference, at which Obama — in the very moment of his humiliation over serial lying — brazenly repeated some of his most notorious and resoundingly disproved whoppers: the claim that his oft-repeated promise about Americans being able to keep their health-insurance plans somehow “ended up being inaccurate” when it was willfully false; the claim that this lie affects only the 5 percent of Americans in the individual market when he has known for years (as John Hinderaker shows) that Obamacare would force the cancellation of tens of millions of employer-provided plans; and so on.

No, the purpose is to highlight how insouciantly lawless and transparently political the president’s latest Obamacare “fix” is. I refer, of course, to Obama’s magnanimous proclamation that he now deigns to permit insurers to issue policies made illegal by the Obamacare statute — at least until the Democrats can get through the 2014 elections. This was frivolous to the point of malfeasance.

Who knew that the day would come when Bill Clinton would be in a position to lecture President Barack Obama about honoring his word?

In an interview with Ozy.com, the former president addressed those millions of Americans getting cancellation notices from their insurance companies, even though Obama had infamously promised that they could keep their plans. “I personally believe,” Clinton said, “even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to these people and let them keep what they got.”

Clinton has a black belt in verbal escape hatches and has never been one to let a strict adherence to truthfulness become an obstacle, so his statement hit with extra force. The words were barely out of his mouth before the speculation over his motives began. For the sake of argument, let’s be overly credulous and literal and assume that he simply thinks it’s wrong for a president to lie to people about whether they can keep their health insurance.

The problem with Clinton’s advice is that Obama can’t possibly take it.

Obama’s promise on insurance wasn’t just injudicious, it was completely impossible. It wasn’t an incidental falsehood but ran counter to the central premise of his own health care law. People losing their current insurance isn’t an unintended consequence of the law; it is an intended consequence without which much of the law doesn’t work.

How many Democrats made the promise? There’s no comprehensive list of all of them, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office has compiled a list of 27 Democratic senators who pledged that Americans could keep their coverage under Obamacare. The list includes the entire Democratic leadership in the Senate as well as Democrats facing tough re-election races in 2014, like Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich, and Kay Hagan. Here is that list, compiled by McConnell’s office:

SEN. HARRY REID (D-Nev.): “In fact, one of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it.” (Sen. Reid, Congressional Record, S.8642, 8/3/09)

SEN. RICHARD DURBIN: “We believe — and we stand by this — if you like your current health insurance plan, you will be able to keep it, plain and simple, straightforward.” (Sen. Durbin, Congressional Record, S.6401, 6/10/09)

SEN. PATTY MURRAY (D-Wash.): “Again, if you like what you have, you will be able to keep it. Let me say this again: If you like what you have, when our legislation is passed and signed by the President, you will be able to keep it.” (Sen. Murray, Congressional Record, S.6400, 6/10/09)

SEN. MAX BAUCUS (D-Mont.): “That is why one of the central promises of health care reform has been and is: If you like what you have, you can keep it. That is critically important. If a person has a plan, and he or she likes it, he or she can keep it.” (Sen. Baucus, Congressional Record, S.7676, 9/29/10)

“President Obama’s so-called apology, was as phony as his fraudulent marketing of Obamacare. He seemed to be saying he was sorry Americans actually believed him, but took no responsibility for their plight. It was like telling someone you’re sorry their dog died, but refusing to acknowledge you ran over the dog.

“Sorry Mr. President, it didn’t work. Millions of Americans are coming to realize that those are your tire tracks on their cancelled policies. It is also obvious that you didn’t inadvertently misspeak when you promised Americans they can keep their doctors and health plans – and do it all at a lower cost.

“Those assurances weren’t slight exaggerations or innocent shadings of the truth. They were statements that were fully vetted, coldly calculated, and carefully crafted to deceptively sell your health care plan to a trusting public. It was a political fraud echoed relentlessly by House and Senate Democrats who should be held accountable for the disastrous consequences of their grand deception.

“Consumer fraud this massive in the private sector could – and should – bear serious legal ramifications. For President Obama, however, it helped secure enough votes to pass Obamacare, and win reelection.

During an appearance on ABC’s This Week Sunday, New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand admitted in passing that it was known President Obama was lying as he repeatedly stated people could keep health insurance plans they liked under Obamacare.

“He should’ve just been specific. No we all knew,” GIllinbrand said. “The whole point of the plan is to cover things people need, like preventive care, birth control, pregnancy. How many women, the minute they get pregnant, might risk their coverage. How many women paid more because of their gender, because they might get pregnant. Those are the reforms.”

They all knew the truth, but none of them spoke up. Remember that on election day.

Incompetence, deception, and lack of accountability doomed the Obamacare rollout. That’s old news. What’s new? The nagging durability of the White House’s incompetence, deception, and lack of accountability.

1. The Washington Postreported on Sunday that the Obama administration will consider the new online marketplace a success if 80 percent of users can buy health insurance. That is absurd. First, it’s another broken promise. The president and his advisers responded to the disastrous rollout last month by vowing to deliver an Amazon.com-quality website by the end of November. (If history remembers President Obama for one thing, other than his barrier-breaking 2008 election, it might be the outsized and unmet expectations that paved the path of his presidency.) Second, in what other line of work is 20 percent failure considered a success? If one out of every five meals served by a restaurant is inedible, the joint goes out of business.

2. The same story by Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin revealed that the Health and Human Services Department hired technology contractors without requiring specific performance criteria. It is customary in the private sector to include benchmarks in technology contracts. Not so with the seat-of-their-smarty-pants Obama administration. “The meaning of success was defined for the first time during the panicky days of October, when White House officials belatedly recognized that the federal exchange had serious software and hardware defects,” ThePost reported.

The biggest shock and the most damning revelation came in the President’s hasty and awkward press conference when President Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:

OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.

This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.

Reflect on that for a moment. The President of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office day after day. The West Wing is stuffed with high power aides. His political appointees sit atop federal bureaucracies, monitoring the work of the career staff around them. The President has told his core team, over and over, that the health care law and the website rollout are his number one domestic priorities.

And with all this, neither he nor, apparently, anyone in his close circle of aides and advisors knew that the website was a disaster. Vapid, blind, idly flapping their lips; they pushed paper, attended meetings and edited memos as the roof came crashing down. It is one thing to fail; it is much, much worse not to see failure coming. There is no way to construe this as anything but a world class flop.

The Political Insiders tackle issues of the President’s credibility, Hillary’s prospects, and more:

The GOP needs to heed John Leboutillier’s advice and unite behind their own plan. There is a plan in the House: The American Health Care Reform Act. Why they’re not talking about their own ideas as an alternative to ObamaCare is anyone’s guess.

The Obamacare rollout debacle has left many political losers in its wake but just a handful of winners. The losers are obvious: every Democrat politician and the entire establishment media complex look like, for lack of a better phrase, lying wankers.

Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) look like heroes, having warned repeatedly of the impending disaster and doing everything in their power to stop the onslaught of canceled policies. Had the RINO old guard, led by the feckless John McCain and Mitch McConnell, actually backed up their conservative betters, the American people might be having a very different kind of conversation today.

The thing about Obamacare, the five million who lost their health care right now, is just the beginning of this that. The next shoes that are going to be dropping, one of the next shoes that’s going to be dropping is you’re going to see more and more people realizing they can’t keep their doctor. Texas Oncology, one the very best cancer centers in Texas has just announced it’s not going to participate in Obamacare.

JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: Can I just ask you, the president said yesterday, ‘I was not informed directly that the web site would not be working the way it was supposed to.’ I mean, we’ve heard the latest is the project manager on healthcare.gov warned, was worried this thing could crash at takeoff. I’m just wondering, did the president at any point ask the question has this thing been tested? Are we ready to go? What was the answer to that.

JAY CARNEY: The president was regularly briefed on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the run-up to the launch. What he and others have said is that we — at no time did we anticipate that the problems that we ended up seeing on October 1st would occur. And if we had –

KARL: People working on this knew there were problems, were worried this could happen and I’m just asking did the president ask the question?

CARNEY: Absolutely. The president constantly asked where we were and what the progress on –

KARL: So who misled him? If they knew these problems and didn’t disclose it to him –

CARNEY: Again, there’s a jump in your logic there. The fact is, as we acknowledged and have said since October 1st and even before that, we anticipated glitches, we were told there might be some problems, and as is the case when any site –

Many more GOEs are of the current Administration’s making. There is of course ObamaCare – a slow motion train wreck that continues its shamble off the tracks into oblivion. But that is not even close to all.

The report states the deal submitted in Geneva earlier this month was a direct result of these secret year-long negotiations between teams headed by Jarrett and Iran’s Ali Akbar Salehi. That deal was ultimately rejected when France and Israel raised strong objections, and talks are expected to resume this Wednesday.

Remember the pro-ObamaCare doctors (in white labcoats) who assembled on the White House lawn for a photo op in 2009? They were political activist docs from the left-wing CAP group, Doctors for America….

Who is behind “Doctors for America”?
(Spoiler alert: Center for American Progress)

Gee — only 12? You would think an Obamabot like Matthew Lynch (“Ed.D.”), a clueless git writing at Huffpo, could have come up with at least a half dozen more reasons why President Obama is one of the best presidents in the history of…history.

I will give you a sampling of each reason — no sense spoiling your appetite.

1. He is for The People. Say what you will about Barack Obama, but unlike the many presidents who preceded him, he cares about what is best for the greater good.

I will probably mention this more than once. This is a guy with a doctorate degree. Why does he think like a sophomore in high school?

2. He is for civil rights. He has consistently spoken on behalf of the disenfranchised, the underdog and the most controversial members of society — despite the fact that it was politically unpopular to do so at the time.

It has not been “politically unpopular” to speak about civil rights for about 30 years. But don’t stop him. He’s on a roll.

3. He is for one race — the human race. In just a few short years, Obama’s professional achievements and continued demonstration of equality and integrity have done wonders for race relations.

I almost stopped reading at this point. But I was compelled to continue — much for the same reason I watch NASCAR: I am intensely curious about what cars are going to spin out in turn 3.

At a Common Core forum held Tuesday at Ward Melville High School, Beth Dimino ripped New York State Education Commissioner John King, calling for his “resignation and firing” and describing the Common Core curriculum as a form of “child abuse.” Dimino is a 16-year science teacher in the Comsewogue School District, and serves as President of the Port Jefferson Station Teachers Association (PJSTA).

Her speech, a short two-minute blast on the curriculum and its supporters received several outbursts of applause, as well as a standing ovation when she walked away from the podium.

Recently, Karapaia, a Japanese news site focusing on the strange and weird, posted a video of what seems to be a giant monster being dug out of the ground in Vietnam. In the video, the long, fat, gray slug-like creature is surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers watching with rapt attention as the horrifying behemoth is hoisted onto a trailer.

But what in the world could it be? A giant worm? An alien aggressor? A genetic experiment gone horribly wrong?

Every week on Monday morning , the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day or just a look at culture and daily life. This week’s question:How does your family traditionally celebrate Thanksgiving?

Liberals simply cannot get it through their thick skulls that people lack respect for Obama because OBAMA SUCKS AS PRESIDENT. It’s not any more complicated than that. It has nothing to do with his race. It has to do with the fact that he is the worst president ever. Period.

I’ve always been amazed at the hypocrisy of dopey libs and the double standard they are allowed to operate within.

The “Pro Choice” crowd, the people who say it’s “your body, your choice”, which of course only applies to the murder of defenseless babies. It never applies to any American adult’s right to make decisions concerning their own health care, smoking, trans fats, seat belts or even 16 oz sodas.

The same dopey libs who now are saying that it’s only 5% of the policies that are being cancelled, so what’s the problem? The same people who when it comes to Gun Control argue, that if “only it saves one life”, it’s worth it. The same crowd who now says that a government developed and run website, is now going to operate at only 80%, once it’s fixed, think this is acceptable. If any privately run commercial website had a 20% error factor, they’d be hauled into Court and held accountable.

The same crowd who vilify Insurance Company, Big Pharmaceutical or anything Capitalistic that they love to tax the living hell out for their social welfare redistribution. For five years they beat up Insurance companies and is trying to regulate it out of business, now from the debacle of their own doing, who do they. So who do they call to help them fix this mess and at the same time beat the living hell out of and are blaming? They wrote a law and wrote regulations to create their dopey lib utopia of health care for everyone. The minions thought what a great idea, until they found out they were the very ones who are going to pay for this nightmare, unless of course you’re ending up on the medicaid dole.

Anyone who thinks that this is the end of liberalism, including Charles Krauthammer had better rethink this. If anything libs are relentless, they never give up. This is merely a set back in their ultimate goal. . . .socialism. I’ll never figure out how the hell they get away with it, yet somehow they always do.